Understanding the Franco Regime: A Historical Analysis

A Dictatorial Regime
The Franco regime was a dictatorship that, depending on international political circumstances, evolved over time. Its most notable characteristics were:

• Born as a dictatorship inspired by fascist totalitarianism.
• Abolished the 1931 Constitution, popular sovereignty, political parties, and trade unions.
• Only allowed the existence of a single party and an official union.

Franco was the leader, the "charismatic leader" who ran the state government and served as president for much of the dictatorship. Moreover, he was Generalissimo of all the armies and the national party leader. He was not an elected leader and was only answerable to God and history.

The regime had a unitary and centralist conception of the state, abolishing autonomous status. Spain was proclaimed "a great and free nation."

Repression of opposition was carried out by military courts, applying the death penalty or imprisonment to those who had sympathized with the Republic. The regime refined the administration, education, and the military to be purely Francoist, establishing censorship of publications (newspapers, etc.) and creating a secret police (political-social).

The regime was supported by three pillars:

• The army, which participated actively in power.
• The single party, called the Traditionalist Spanish Falange, whose secretary was JONS Serrano Suñer, Franco's brother. This party undertook to provide the regime's ideology, supply positions in the administration, and garner social support for the regime. It consisted of four organizations: the Youth Front (which indoctrinated young people), the Women's Section (which taught women to submit to their husbands), the Spanish Union University (SEU), and the National Unionist (CNS), which incorporated employers and workers in a vertical union.
• The Catholic Church, which played a leading role as it was a Catholic confessional state. The Church received generous public funding, extensive rights for education, morals, and manners, and the power to censor publications.

Additionally, the regime received support from economic and social elites, who regained the economic, social, and political power they had lost during the Republic. The middle classes, despite their ideological and political rejection of the dictatorship, remained passive and apolitical in response to the trauma of the Civil War.

The "families" in power included the army (as major offices of state were held by military personnel), the movement (which was slightly distanced from power during the 40s), and the Church (which gained power in the following decade). The Church formed associations like the National Catholic Association of Propagandists in the 50s and Opus Dei in the 60s, which also provided senior positions.